


Take My Body Home

by Kiyaar



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: Bondage, Bottom Steve, CBT, D/s, Dark, Dark Tony, Edgeplay, Emphatically not a Fix-It, Established Relationship, Extremis, Gangbang, Humiliation, Hurt No Comfort, Impact Play, Knives, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Partner Abuse, Sadism, Sensory Deprivation, Superior Iron Man, Tears, Transhumanism, canon-divergent AU, hickmanvengers, the poorest BDSM etiquette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-06-07 17:15:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6816097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiyaar/pseuds/Kiyaar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of Superior Iron Man, Tony sells Extremis to the highest bidder and finds himself living as an expatriate in Russia.</p><p>Steve's never been good at letting go.</p><p>Written for the Cap-Ironman 2016 Reverse Big Bang.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take My Body Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [phoenixmetaphor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixmetaphor/gifts).



> Thank you to Jess, Donna, Tea, and Dicey for cheerleading/beta. 
> 
> Thank you to phoenixmetaphor, who not only inspired this wicked thing but drew more FANTASTIC ART to go with it! [Go tell her how amazing it is!](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7029175/chapters/15994579)
> 
> **This is a fucked-up, brutal thing. I don't know what you expect from me by now.**

There was a time, before, when Steve could lose hours, days, even, touching Tony’s skin.

Before Wanda fell apart and the war and the Skrulls, before Tony _forgot_ and erased their life together along with all of his failures, they could stand each other for hours. Days. Tucked away, their skin tacky with sweat, the sheets damp and cold underneath them. Anywhere. Brooklyn, Midtown, once in a safe house in Queens when Kang opened a portal and they had to run. “The world’s ending,” Tony had pointed out, and Steve maybe should have known, then, when he chose to put down his shield and bury himself in Tony’s body instead of fighting the fight.

Tony had that way of snaring him.

Tony snares whatever he wants, now, whomever he wants, whispers honeyed lies to beautiful strangers. There are no closed doors anymore, no glancing over shoulders, no carefully quashed public displays of affection so the press doesn’t get the wrong idea. He publicly welcomes any and all genitalia. He’s bronzed and drunk and Steve watches him charm San Francisco within an inch of their lives.

Now Steve’s skin is paper-thin, speckled with liver spots. His hair is white, not silver like he always thought it would be. His joints groan. He feels ridiculous when he coaxes his legs into his leather S.H.I.E.L.D. uniform and buckles his utility belt. There’s nothing in it. It’s for show. Everything is for show.

 

\- - -

 

 _What are we going to do about Tony,_ Maria’s favorite refrain, turns into: _what are_ you _going to do about Tony?_

He’s going to watch. He’s going to watch, entranced, as Tony lives out his life on the other coast and peddles his poison to everyone who’ll have it. He’s going to lust after someone who’s dead.

Steve tries the hands-on approach, just once. Shows up at his door with a half-dozen S.H.I.E.L.D.agents.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Tony says, sipping a martini like he’s just forgotten how this nearly killed him, nearly killed them both. Like he’s forgotten how hard he once fought to get his life back.

Steve says as much.

“That’s the fucking point, Steve,” Tony says, like he’s an idiot.

 

\- - -

 

It’s snowing when Steve steps off the plane.

It’s still startling to him, even after three years of this, that Tony has chosen to settle here, to live out his life in this swirl of smog and snow.

The city smells sour, like snow and gravel and the fetid creep of rot. It calls him back, every time, to nights spent huddled in forests and cheeks red to the cold, trucks that leaked more fluids than they held and had to be coaxed back to life. Gasoline in his mouth as he knelt in a shed and sucked it out of the tank of a truck.

 _Another life_ , his Tony would have said. _Come back, old man_.

He walks past Lubyanka with the windows blacked out and can’t even feel grateful for the facial net he’s wearing that makes him look like a balding old man. Tony designed it, and if he thinks about that for too long, he wants to rip it off. Every document on his person is forged. Everything about him is a farce.

He’s long since thrown integrity out the window.

Tony’s penthouse is a few streets down from Gum, well within the glitzy few blocks surrounding the Kremlin, far and away from the stacks and stacks of crumbling high rises towards the outskirts. Steve doesn’t bother with Red Square, today. Usually he’d need it: a quick lap, indolent sightseeing, maybe the cathedrals inside the walls to calm his nerves. He’s jet-lagged, dehydrated. He needs time to feel numb before the actual event.

A couple asks him in broken Russian if he’ll take their picture, then titter at each other in French. _Nous pouvons chercher_ _quelqu'un d'autre,_ the woman says, when she sees the look on his face. Steve snorts and walks by like he doesn’t care. He doesn’t. Does he look approachable? He’s going to reprogram the net so he looks a nightmare on the way back.

The woman who watches the door is in her early sixties, perched on a spindly stool reading Pravda. She doesn’t recognize him; last time the net had made him an attractive young brunette. Tony had made him keep it on the whole weekend; given him the body to match until Steve’s face had started to blister as his system settled into sepsis from the rejection.

Steve thinks he preferred it to his own face despite the two weeks it took to heal.

He grunts his way through the conversation. She insists: Mr. Stark takes no visitors. He flashes his access card at her and sighs like the elderly man he’s supposed to be. When she relents, after fifteen minutes of circular, insistent conversation, she stands beside the elevator door while he waits, slumping with his hands shoved deep into his pockets. Glaring.

Occasionally Steve will startle Tony’s maid as she systematically discards all evidence of Tony’s latest shitshow. Today, the penthouse is empty, all sleek surfaces and throw pillows. He peers out the window: Red Square is beginning to clear. The light show is coming up, the neon awash on the freshly fallen snow. Tony has probably gone out – rude, but not unexpected. It’s just how he is, now. Knew Steve was coming – can trace his every move now that he has Extremis in his bloodstream – and vacated.

He checks his watch – it’s six. Early enough for Tony to be peddling his wares at the clubs Steve might be able to get into if he caved and wore something luxurious and put on his real face, the one he doesn’t get anymore unless Tony gives it to him.

 _You look like a fucking propaganda poster_ , Tony had spat, once, early on, when this was all still appalling and unthinkable and every word was spoken with intent to maim.

There’s a note, on the coffee table, and a syringe. _You know what to do,_ it says in Tony’s neat mechanic’s hand.

Tony enjoys a standard of luxury most people in this city will only dream about. Steve trails his hand over the granite countertops, drags his socked feet over Tony’s expensive tiled floors, compelled to haunt. Steve isn’t convenient just yet, hasn’t earned the privilege of Tony’s attention. He tries the playroom: locked.

He puts on the news and snatches off the net clinging to his face. He calls Sam and leaves a message, because he doesn’t want to talk about it, but he promised he’d check in. He leaves the syringe untouched. He drapes himself over Tony’s couch like a nameless conquest and falls asleep.

 

\- - -

 

Tony stumbles in during the early hours of the morning, tells whatever AI he’s using these days to lock the place down. Steve watches, half awake, as his view of the city is slowly obscured by the security shutters.

Tony rips his blanket away and shoves a bag of pies at him. It’s far more than his metabolism needs.

Right to business, then.

Tony has anticipated his hunger, his jet lag, as he does all of Steve’s material needs, _wouldn’t do to let the décor starve_ , he’d said one weekend when he’d been feeling particularly malicious. Steve grabs for one of the meat ones and crams it into his mouth so he doesn’t have to watch Tony rolling his neck, pulling his tie apart, dropping his jacket on the floor. There are hickeys blooming all over his neck, nips where someone else’s mouth has been, a particularly dark one right under his jaw. He reeks of perfume and vodka and sweat.

Steve imagines him shopping at Gum, imagines whatever blond-of-the-week holds his bags and fawns over him when he struts out of dressing rooms. Imagines him smiling, dazzling, showing his face. That must be nice. Steve should have appreciated it when he had it, perhaps.

He’s long stopped trying to put himself in Tony’s shoes.

Tony skulks over to the bar. He takes a little too long to pick out absinthe spoons. He resolutely avoids looking in Steve’s direction.

“Tony,” Steve says, while he’s still allowed.

“Don’t start that.” Tony turns his back so he doesn’t have to look at Steve being inconveniently unattractive on his divan. “You missed the party,” Tony says absently, eyes glazed and Extremis-white, one hand in midair mimicking an interface he no longer needs.

“Was Putin there,” Steve says. He wants to be bitter, but he’s flat and thin and stretched and his fire just doesn’t burn as bright, these days.

The white covering Tony’s irises like a weird alien film retracts, and Tony stares him down with his rich blue eyes.

“Free-market capitalism, dear,” Tony says, offers him a snake-oil smile. “Don’t be a fucking hypocrite. How was your flight?”

“How’s life as an ex-pat?” Steve says, seething. He means it to be drenched in poison.

“Lucrative,” Tony says cordially. “No FDA, 8 months of winter – I spend a million in development and get it back in billions in a month. It’s so much more than just – eye color and acne and shit. You’ve seen those vets in the metro from Crimea sitting on boxes. I worked out the limb regen issue and they’re eating out of my goddamned hand–”

Tony’s laughter rings out, bounces off the fancy molded ceiling and the granite countertops and the hardwood floor.

Steve doesn’t know what’s crueler – that he hasn’t heard it in years, or that it’s not Tony’s laugh, it’s altered, _tinkered-with_ , a perfect subroutine, this effortless chime that can charm a room before they’ve even had time to hate him.

“Are you making them pay,” Steve asks under his breath, and he can’t even look at Tony. “Do you make them pay for their fucking _legs_ , Tony–”

“Yep,” Tony says. “Oh, come on. They get their lives back for a day, for sixty – for a _dollar_ , Steve. It gives them hope.” The corners of his mouth twist up in some macabre parody of a smile.

It hits him, sometimes, like this, like something is gripping his lungs and freezing his legs. That he’s talking to a dead man. That he’s failed, a long time ago, and what he’s doing is the equivalent of sitting in a burnt-out building and hoping the ashes will talk back to him.

“Are you here to actually do your job this time?” Tony says. He sips. “Or is this purely a social call?”

Steve grits his teeth and lets his face sink into a miserable smile. They can do that part later, the part where Steve tries to appeal to the compassionate creature he knew, and the capricious monster wearing his face smiles like he’s fucking adorable and makes him feel like a child for even thinking he can try.

“Of course,” Steve deadpans, numb. “Interpol is outside.”

 _It’s easy,_ Tony had told him, at the beginning, when everyone was still trying to coax him in from the cold. Cruelty comes naturally to him now.

Tony turns around with two drinks in his hand. Steve takes his with a gnarled hand, watches his dose of Extremis slide to the bottom of the glass and rest in an iridescent film over the pulverized grapefruit. Tony makes sure his skin doesn’t touch Steve’s, like Steve is some offensive relic and he doesn’t want the taint.

“Take your medicine,” Tony says, and all but shoves it at him. He silently extends his hand for Steve’s watch so he can dismantle the tracker.

Steve hands him the empty glass and flees to the bathroom before he can say something ugly and dig himself a deeper hole.

Steve turns the lock behind him even though Tony can unlock most anything with his mind with a thought. Steve’s not worth the effort. Tony doesn’t even care, Tony won’t watch this part, can’t be bothered with Steve’s shriveled body or the moles on his back or the way his knees crack as his boxers hit the floor.

His skin starts to change as he’s reaching a hand out to turn on the shower. He feels his heart pump faster, and the liver spots shrink and fade. His knuckles stop aching. His vision blurs because he hasn’t taken out his contacts.

The effect should be like being reborn, but he's done that, and this is more like consensual poison. 

He knows it, and still, he slicks Tony’s sandalwood soap into his palms and tries to enjoy his body again because it won’t last beyond these walls. Because Tony will never step into the shower with him again or kiss him or touch him like he loves him because he doesn’t. Because this is all just a matter of convenience and self-flagellation now, because somewhere along the way the years slipped by and doors slammed all on their own, and here they are.

He’s losing the war.

Steve pulls at the useless weight between his legs. He pinches himself until he starts to fill out, until his balls start to ache and he craves _fullness_ enough to give himself a quick, dirty lube job.

He slouches out of the shower. He touches his young skin. He’s flushed.

He does his best to remember how to be alive.

 

\- - -

 

Before Tony decided he’d rather succumb than fight, that having no soul was easier than fighting to get his back, he used to tell Steve that he needed to stop wallowing.

Steve used to say he was entitled. “I’m a senior citizen,” he’d say, and Tony would laugh and the skin around his eyes would crinkle and Steve would fall for him all over again. He used to think that he’d seen enough and lived enough and gotten knocked down enough. He had the courage of his convictions. That was enough to make Tony look at him like he had singlehandedly set the stars in motion.

Tony has done away with that version.

Steve kneels with his forehead to the ground, because this is Tony’s show and this Tony is accustomed to getting whatever he wants, whenever he wants it. A bad habit, Steve used to say.

Not that this is Steve’s habit; it isn’t. Habits are unconscious behaviors. Steve is complicit in this.

Steve wants to believe he is not a person who cavorts with Tony Stark, weapons dealer (again). He is not a man who knows how to compromise. He is not a man who uses his government clearance level to fly to Russia to spend a weekend in this man’s loft. He shouldn’t be a man who fucks people whose accomplishments include four separate counts of treason.

Tony slaps him on the flank, then soothes his palm over the sting of it. “Pay attention,” he says, and draws an obscene moan out of Steve’s mouth.

The tile is hell on his knees, and Tony is all tempting heat moving around outside his periphery, his dress shoes tapping on the floor. He’s probably got a drink in one hand right now. He’s probably unbuttoning his shirt with the other, he’s probably got half his brain in San Francisco to monitor his fucking science experiments and a quarter in the Kremlin negotiating for more money and–

Tony kicks him absently in the ribs, and Steve heaves and presses his forehead back against the floor.

“No,” Tony says, and there’s a boot under his chin, leather, black, expensive. Tony’s. Forcing him up, forcing him to bare his face. “Don’t you dare.”

Much less is permitted than is forbidden, here in Tony’s kingdom.

He wants to know what Tony looks like, what he’s doing, what new thing he’s planning to torment Steve with tonight. _Not your job_ bounces through his mind, inexplicably voiced in Tony’s old baritone, less venom, more honey.

God, he aches for praise.

No praise comes. Tony runs the flat of his palm over the straining cords of Steve’s neck. It’s not a caress; he just wants to experience the rapture of Steve’s anatomy. “Shh,” Tony croons, because Steve is gasping and Tony’s fingers are slithering into his ass and Steve can feel beads of sweat rolling down his thighs. He’s trembling, god help him, he hasn’t even considered his genitals since the last time they’d done this – months ago, now. “Filthy old man,” Tony says, and if Steve works at it, it almost sounds fond. He wrenches Steve’s head to the side. Steve struggles to keep his eyes forward. Tony’s perfect sculpture.

Tony spits in his mouth.

It’s over. Steve comes, unpermitted, all over Tony’s hand.

Tony wipes it up with his expensive tie and then balls it up and stuffs it into Steve’s mouth.

“Fun fact,” Tony says, and flicks Steve’s cock and it’s too much, it’s too much. Steve shouts, bites down on his own lip. “It takes a lot to make you go soft, with this batch.”

Tony’s fingers track, insatiable, over the slim lines of his hipbones, over the planes of his back. They dip down past his tailbone and Tony just slides into his body like it’s his right, like he’s laying claim, inspecting. Steve’s surface area belongs to Tony.

“You’d best enjoy yourself, because I’m gonna _wring_ it out of you by the time we’re done here,” Tony whispers, and then Tony shuffles into place behind him, the stiffness of his slacks rubbing at the back of his legs.

Tony’s standing orders are not to move but how is he supposed to do that, how is he supposed to hold back while Tony is _right there_ , every inch of him, Steve’s, for these two short impossible days, Tony is pressing inside him and it’s like he never left. _Damaged,_ flits across Steve’s mind but his vision only stretches to the way his knuckles are white on the rug and the skyline just past the coffee table and the way Tony has one hand on his shoulder while he just rests there, the weight of him seated inside Steve.

He rolls, just once. Twice. “You’re still a spectacular ride,” he says, and Steve stares ahead, dead-eyed, because there’s no point in engaging him. His function is to stay here like a Clydesdale while Tony enjoys him.

Tony hasn’t touched him, won’t, unless he begs very convincingly. Later, maybe. He’s slow about it, his movements heavy and calculated. He leans all of his weight on Steve’s back – “You can take it, _take it_ , Steve” – and breathes down Steve’s neck while his cock hangs there, nearly brushing the floor, entirely neglected. He digs his nails into Steve’s skin when he finishes, like he’s trying to claw his way inside. It feels like it goes on forever, and something distant and shameful in Steve is proud of that.

Tony pulls out too soon. His come goes with him, a warm rush of it down Steve’s sack. Steve is still hard, strung-out. He tries to find the shifts that give his muscles relief without _moving_. He needs a plug, the bench, a toy, something.  

Steve feels Tony’s finger snaking between his balls, Tony’s hands pulling the tie out of his mouth. Tony dumps a fingerful of his come warm on his tongue, swipes his finger around in Steve’s mouth and then forces Steve’s lips together. The minute Tony’s finger leaves the heat of his mouth his muscles convulse, involuntarily, bereft.

He swallows. It coats the back of his throat. He needs this for hours, this taste, the salt, the foulness of it.

“Do you want more,” Tony purrs, his fingers wandering, slipping, pressing insistently around Steve’s rim. “Or do you want out.” His voice hardens like a shell. Steve holds himself rigid as pleasure seizes him. It’s not _good_ , there’s not coaxing. Everything Tony does to him now is a targeted attack.

If strategy factored into this at all, Steve would never have stepped onto the fucking plane in the first place. Steve trusts him enough not to permanently damage him, but beyond that, well. It’s a gruesome truth Steve no longer troubles himself with.

Tony knows what he’s going to say before he says it, if he wants. Steve knows at least one of the Extremis trials involved telepathy. Does Tony have it? Used to be, they’d finish each other’s sentences. They weren’t even together, just teammates, just intimate enough to trust their lives to each other as barely-strangers. Sidestepping to parry. A well-timed mug of coffee to placate, to bribe. (To thank, maybe. It’s so long ago it’s difficult to imagine.) Knowing just what to say, where to hurt, when to anticipate the fallout.

Tony strokes his back, his hair, ducks down on one knee with his softening cock hanging out of his pants and his shirt open, someone else’s bruises strewn over his bare chest.

Steve’s throat constricts.

“More,” he gasps, because Tony takes his fingers away for an instant and it’s hell.

“Sure you have it in you, old man?” Tony twists his fingers around inside him, feeds Steve more of his come. It’s cooling, foul and thick, but Steve drinks it down. They won’t make it to the playroom, not tonight. He thinks he won’t notice if they do. He’s losing. He wants to lose. His entire world is Tony’s hand on his neck, the way his fingers curl into Steve’s hair, the spaces between the soft baritone of his voice.

“Yes,” Steve says around a throatful of Tony’s come. He’s not sure he has it in him. He’s lying to both of them.

“Don’t worry, I’ll keep trying,” Tony says. “I fucked someone who looked like you, tonight, did you suspect that, Captain?” He cards his sticky hand through Steve’s hair. “He didn’t know who I was. I put him on his knees in a karaoke lounge and fucked his face until he begged me to stop.”

Steve closes his eyes. He always thinks there’s nothing he hasn’t seen, nothing he hasn’t heard that isn’t appalling. The difference is, it comes from Tony’s mouth, now. There’s nothing to be done, even if he could make it past the perimeter, even if he could overpower Tony and run for it. The politsiya wouldn’t touch it. The Kremlin would drop him. He’d have to sell Extremis to China.

Steve doesn’t know that it’s his job to care anymore.

Tony wraps the tie around Steve’s neck. The wet spots stick and drag, but Tony keeps winding it until he can snap his wrist and jerk Steve’s entire head back.

“He had things,” Tony murmurs. “Bioscan said he was filthy, Steve. I didn’t use a condom. I put him all over me and he couldn’t even touch my cells, Steve.”

Tony pulls on the tie and dark spots drift into his field of vision.

“I could have cured him,” Tony whispers in his ear. “I could have taken it all away, and I _didn’t_ ,” he hisses. He leans in over Steve’s trembling naked body. “Just like I can take everything from you if I want, Steve.”

The air comes rushing back.

Steve gasps. He needs to be touched, he needs to come again, he needs Tony to keep telling him he’s a poor excuse for a man.

Tony kicks Steve onto his side, puts the toe of his shoe carefully against Steve’s throat.

“Ton–”

“That’s what you come here for,” Tony says sharply, over him, pressing down, down, down. Can he fix Steve’s crushed pharynx? “For the feeling. To be reminded. For the _chance._ ”

Steve says it. “You know why,” he gasps.

“I know it’s not for me,” Tony snarls. “You don’t care about me,” and his voice turns, impossibly, colder. “You come here to be treated like shit because no one over there cares about you anymore, either.

“Difference is,” Tony says, “they all _lie_ about it.”

Tony waves his hand and brings the dark sheen off the glass, and there he is, cowering on the floor at Tony’s mercy. Bare and filthy and pathetic for anyone with good enough tech to see. The cathedral shimmers in the distance, a kaleidoscope of color and light.

“I am not what you want,” Tony says. “I’m going to remind you why you’ve been shelved, Captain. You get to pretend you’re something better than what you are and I get to fuck your holes and eventually you’ll beg me to stop and we can all go home,” Tony says.

His voice falters on the last part. Steve doesn’t dare move. Doesn’t dare think.

He’ll lose it. He’s losing already.

“More,” Steve says again, his throat like gravel, and then his eyes spill over because Tony enjoys that. Tony likes the sham, and as long as Tony is entertained, Steve is his thrall.

 

\- - -

 

By the time Tony has wrung six more orgasms from him, Steve is decorated with hardware, weights on his balls, alligator clamps that make him scream when Tony finally takes them off. He opens and closes his mouth on the off chance that Tony wants to be sucked.

“You look ridiculous,” Tony says, as he pulls the clamps off. Steve pants and tries not to scream and screams anyway, a hoarse choked-off thing that makes Tony twist one of his nipples in rebuke.

There’s a puddle beneath him, his own come. No blood. _Vanilla,_ he thinks, absurdly. Tony doesn’t make him clean it up. Novel. It worries him, vaguely, though that flits right away again when Tony’s hand curls around his arm, pulls him up, leads him away to the disgustingly extravagant bath suite. All he’s breathing is Tony, the smell of Tony’s cologne and the smell of Tony’s sweat and the feeling of Tony’s skin against his. He stumbles, and gets his cock slapped. He thinks he mumbles his thanks, he can’t be sure.

“Shut up, Steve,” Tony snaps, and it’s a level of casual cruelty Steve isn’t currently equipped to handle.

Tony would have never let him get this out of his mind, before, not when they called themselves lovers and slept in the same bed and smiled into each other’s mouths.

He watches his own hands, marvels at the _strength_ of them and pines for this body and mourns the loss of all of it in the space of a minute that feels like a lifetime. Tony feeds him caviar on water crackers, feeds him berries that must be from Finland, brushes Steve’s hair out of his face again and again. Tony eases him down into the Jacuzzi with his re-engineered body, runs something warm and soft and wet over him, laughs at him while the bubbles froth around his knees and the enormous tub fills with something fragrant and expensive and utterly impersonal.

 _It’s not personal_ , Tony had said, at the beginning, when the memo from Interpol had first crossed Steve’s desk. It’s not personal. Steve tries the shape of the words out in his slow mouth, but it feels like a long time ago.

He’s down too far. He doesn’t want to leave. Distantly, he knows that’s wrong. He knows most of this is wrong. _Shellhead_ , he thinks.

He cries while Tony sits in his lap and plays with his nipples.

“I miss you,” he says. “I miss you, Tony, I miss you,” he says, pleads, murmurs against Tony’s wet skin. Unacceptable; he knows it, Tony isn’t fucking him or hurting him; no crying. Tony hates it when he loses it like this after they fuck. It’s possible there’s a rule about it that he’s forgetting, but his eyes are burning and everything is too much and he would let Tony do anything to his body if it meant Tony would just look at him like he was worth something.

Tony slaps him across the face. “I can have you on a plane in an hour,” Tony says. “Do you want that? Do you want Nat to see you like this?”

The heat of it sears up his cheek. He knows, for the first time in several hours, what he wants to ask for – he wants to see the blue of Tony’s eyes. His mouth is clumsy. He’s crying. He clutches at Tony’s arms, because he doesn’t want anyone to see him like this, ever, he doesn’t want to go back to being something old and useless and shelved. He wants them both on the plane. Cap and Shellhead. Tony and Steve.

“I don’t – no, I’m sorry,” Steve says. “I’m sorry.”

Tony’s teeth are shining white and his eyes are white and he holds Steve’s face between his hands like he did once upon a time.

“You need to pull it the fuck together, Steve,” he says. Steve hates it; his name is a perversion in Tony’s mouth. The reverence is gone. “I have plans, it’s been – three hours, for fuck’s sake. Nod if you understand me.”

Steve thinks he nods.

Bad isn’t even close to dying, but he’s too far away to articulate this beyond, “No, Tony, you don’t understand.” He falters. He falters. He’s lost his anchor. He needed to safeword two hours ago.

“Sorry,” Steve chants, “just-”

“If you apologize to me again, I’m going to rig up the machine and you’re going to limp out of here.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says again. It bubbles out of his throat before he can stop it.

Tony’s face hardens and Steve hides his stupid tears in his own shoulder and waits for it to be over.

Tony hauls him out of the bath, eventually. Towels him down, slides something silicone into him, runs his hands down Steve’s bare sides. Points his finger at the foot of the bed, where Steve’s come is drying on the floor. Snaps. Says: clean it all up. Use your _tongue,_ Steve.

Steve doesn’t need the whole weekend, doesn’t need a week to be broken down into his component parts. He’s ready to beg, right here, right now. He almost weeps when Tony leans in to kiss him. He tilts his head up: a rare blessing, not to be missed. This time could be the last. It could always be the last time. That’s them. That’s how they are.

Tony leans in to kiss him and, instead, punches a syringe into Steve’s neck.

Steve is out before he hits the floor.

 

\- - -

 

When awareness comes, it comes to him all at once, like his nerves have been lit from the inside.

He groans, rolls – chokes.

A long leash attached to the heavy collar around his neck bolts him down. He pries his face away from the floor, tries to wipe the drool from his face and comes up two feet short as the chains attached to his wrist snap taut.

The best part: there’s a cage on him, and there wasn’t when Tony knocked him out.

He withers to look at it. Tony never liked bells and whistles, not for this. This one is a simple thing: no plastic, just cold steel lines and a sound and a plug at the end where Tony fondled him while he slept and locked the monstrous thing into him.

Tony touched him and he _missed it._ He moans into his fist. He wants to be hard.

Tony has moved him into the playroom. It’s exquisitely designed, like all of his places, and fully outfitted now that he has money again. It’s painted in rich oxblood, distressed black trim. A selection of floggers hangs on the hand-carved rack by the heavily bolted door. Steve presses his cheek to the hardwood and listens to Tony’s laugh ring off the floor.

He sits in the corner, bare chest and bare feet, perched like a sphinx atop the only piece of regular furniture in the room, a black armchair. He could be asleep; he’s completely motionless but for his eyes flickering white as he does whatever he does behind the veil.

Steve’s cheeks flush with rage and arousal tangled together.

He dares to bring one hand down between his legs to feel the thing out, to grasp at his own cock and try to stave off the inevitable. To trace the lines of the padlock.

"No," Tony says, idly, bored, and waves his hand.

Steve falls back onto the floor and lets what's happening happen. He brings his hands up to the thing that’s been latched around his neck, the thing that’s choking him. It’s not like in combat, not like dying, though he knows what both of those feel like. It feels like Tony’s signature - all the ecstasy of asphyxiation and all the shame of putting his trust in exactly the wrong hands, fresh as the very first time.

"I warned you," Tony says, and kneels over Steve’s heaving body while Steve reels and retches, while there are still black spots dancing in his vision. He runs a finger over Steve’s ass, pulls at the plug where it’s seated, makes him surge and gasp and whimper. Steve is straining. He’s sure his flesh is pushing absurdly through the bars. He hurts. He aches. He hates Tony. "On a scale of one to I Don’t Give a Fuck, how much do you hate this?" Tony says, and flips the switch again.

Steve screams a hoarse little scream. Pathetic. His lungs give out. The black dances in front of his eyes. Tony is a coward, he reminds himself. Tony plays the long game.

Steve has been playing the long game every day of his fucking life.

None of this is necessarily outside their parameters. He doesn’t know that they have parameters, now. Steve’s not far down enough for this. Tony likes more foreplay, traditionally, before he makes the switch to unrepentant brutality and Steve is screaming for it to stop. Maybe Tony doesn’t need foreplay, anymore. Maybe it’s _irrelevant_ like eating or sleeping or luxuriating in the shower. Maybe he’s a step past human and this doesn’t matter.

Maybe this is the last time they’re doing this and Steve doesn’t matter.

“You were so diligent yesterday,” Tony says.

“That’s what you pay me for,” Steve spits, when he can.

“Don’t be crass,” Tony tells him. “I know you,” Tony says, and Steve doesn’t have the energy to wince, just to lie there and pant and let Tony wave his hand and give him the gift of oxygen again. He’s trembling when he finally works up the nerve to feel the collar out: seamless, more padding than usual. Metal nodes studded in around the perimeter where it meets the skin of his neck.

“Snap to, Steve,” says Tony. “Here.” He points at his own feet. He waves his hands and lets out the chains.

Steve boarded a plane. He polished off the bottle of Jim Beam before they made it to Munich and bared his face to the cold and lied to Maria Hill so he could have this chance to eke out whatever half-life he’s able before he goes limping back to obsolescence.

Except he isn’t shameless, and Tony knows how to twist it, how to tangle it up and tie him in irreversible knots. Steve flushes all the way down his belly and the metal is so cold against his skin. He hates it, and he’ll do it, and they both know it. He’ll do anything.

“I fixed your knees, _crawl_ ,” Tony snaps.

Steve crawls. It’s too late, he’s already committed Tony’s cardinal sin: hesitation. It’s some infraction of the rules, all of this is, but he crawls past the cross and makes himself drag his eyes away from the bench and feels the way his cock is trying to be fat and heavy. The sound is unbearable, but he can’t will himself soft. Tony knew this would happen, he knows what it does to him, he can feel the cold metal locked around his groin bob as he moves. He crawls and thinks about how Tony fed him and bathed him and dumped him on the floor like trash and, because Steve is an ideological traitor, it only makes him harder.

Once upon a time, he crawled to Tony as Tony sat in his fancy ergonomic desk chair in his fancy office in his fancy tower, while Tony’s mouth went slack with wonder. Once upon a time, he very carefully unbuttoned Tony’s Versace slacks and sat there for hours while Tony worked, his hands clasped behind his back and Tony’s cock warm and thick on his tongue and closed his eyes because it was the only thing that mattered in the entire world.

This is not that.

Tony strokes a hand down his jaw, feels around his lips. Slides his thumb into Steve’s mouth, presses down on his tongue and waits for Steve to suck.

Steve does it. His eyes blur, unfocused. They settle somewhere over near the machine.

“Your wardrobe is ready,” Tony says. “How would you like _me_ , Captain?” he says, _Captain,_ like it’s hysterical and Steve is his punch line. He pulls his thumb out of Steve’s mouth, wipes it on his cheek. “Ladies’ choice.”

And then Tony’s shape changes - he’s not in the suit, anymore, he’s in that very Versace suit, like a revenant, his hair coiffed and effortless, the white film gone from his eyes.

“It’s what you’re thinking about,” Tony says when he catches Steve’s glare. “That’s my hardware bouncing around in that perfect body of yours.”

“Stay out of my head,” Steve snarls.

“Well, since you asked so nicely,” Tony says, “Permission to speak freely.” He smirks and crosses his legs and toes at Steve’s collar with one of his dress shoes.

Steve clenches his jaw.

“You may want to reconsider your silence,” Tony says, and he had to beg Tony for days in advance to get him to sound like that, once upon a time. “It’s my turn to pick,” he says, as if it’s ever Steve’s turn, now, as if there’s anything like equivalent exchange between them.

“Stay out of my head,” he says again. He feels dull, blunted. A wrung-out husk.  

Tony cycles through several older incarnations of the armor.

“No armor,” Steve hears himself say.

“What was that?” Tony asks, and morphs into the suit he was wearing when he stood on the fucking Helicarrier and told Steve he was a sore loser and walked away.

“You heard me,” Steve says. It changes again; now it’s the armor Tony was wearing when he erased Steve’s memory. The air feels thinner.

“No armor? That’s new. You love the armor, Steve.” Tony slides out of the chair, sinks to his knees with a clank, pulls Steve’s head back with a fistful of his hair. “You can’t have something for nothing,” he hisses.

“I know,” Steve says dully. Whatever it is, whatever it will be, he’ll do it. He will melt into the floor if they do this with Tony in his armor. He can’t.

Tony walks to the big mirror behind the bench, leaves Steve kneeling at the foot of an empty chair, cycles through a few different configurations of latex and lace and studs before he settles on a leather number that drains the blood from Steve’s head. He’s sure he would be drooling if he’d been gagged. Straps crisscross Tony’s chest, hugging his pecs, his hips, the swell of his ass. There are fishnets. There is a row of knives strapped to Tony’s thigh. There is a flint-grey pistol that Steve is certain he’ll be deep-throating by the end of the night.

Steve hisses, tries to will his cock soft again. He aches for pain, real pain, pain that makes him bleed, anything to distract him. He wants to stop being half-hard. He wants to close his eyes and succumb.

Tony struts back. He knows how he looks. He pulls a bullwhip off the wall and thrusts a paper-wrapped package into Steve’s chest. “Here,” he says. “This one is yours.” He waves his hand again, and the chains fall away from the cuffs.

Steve pulls the paper off sheet by sheet. He can barely work his hands, when the last of it falls away. His breath catches in his throat. “No,” he mumbles.

“Are you safewording?” Tony asks merrily.

“Don’t make me wear this,” Steve says, because that chapter is done and gone and nothing either of them says or does ever puts them back at that place again.

Tony places his foot squarely under Steve’s crotch and grinds up.

“I’m sorry, what was that,” Tony says.

“Please don’t make me wear this,” Steve amends, gasping. “Tony–”

“Beg,” Tony says.

“Please,” Steve says.

“Insincere,” Tony snaps. “Try with your _mouth_.”

Tony undoes the flap on his ridiculous leather pants and lets himself fall free, plump and heavy. Lets Steve look. Doesn’t say a word. Something in Steve quietly slips away when he sees that Tony has fixed the way he always curved a little to the left.

Steve does it. No hesitating this time, Tony is too unpredictable today, too capricious, and Steve doesn’t know if he can truly afford another infraction so soon. He noses in, bumps his chin against Tony’s balls. He rests there, his face nestled where Tony’s pubes used to be, before he sculpted himself into this shameless thing that struts around like a god.

He slides Tony’s perfectly engineered cock over his tongue, then, Tony's hand in his hair, Tony's flesh bumping the back of his throat. It's a relief, he doesn't have to think about this, _this is why you come here_ , he reminds himself. Nothing in all the world but the quiet sounds of Tony sighing above him and the constriction of his throat and the brutal way his head spins when he knows he's not getting enough oxygen. He tells himself that he’s letting this happen: Tony is in his mouth because Tony won't be in his bed anymore, or in his life, or on his team, ever. The truth is something closer to Tony, using him up, a simpler status quo. Steve will be Tony's perfect vessel. _You’re like a god,_ Tony had told him once. A statue, he'd said. Perfect, unfeeling, forever. Steve floats.

Steve must be listing, because Tony slaps his cheek, grabs his chin. Loops the leash around his hand, yanks. “Don’t be ungrateful,” Tony hisses. “It’s a gift, say _thank you._ ”

Tony tells him his technique is shit, and he isn’t wrong. His tongue feels thick and slow and all he can taste is Tony, the barely-there slip of his precome. It’s all he cares about. At some point his limbs slide over themselves. Tony’s grip on his head keeps him up, even as he sways on his knees and swallows again and again. He’s losing his sense of time: there are no windows in the playroom. He could have slept for three hours or thirteen. Tony won’t tell him unless it becomes relevant.

Tony makes him wear the uniform anyway.

It’s no work at all for Tony to yank on his leash until he crawls to the bench, pinch the inside of his thighs until he spreads wide enough for Tony to pull on the pants leg by leg. Tony tucks the handle of the whip carefully between Steve’s teeth while he does up the clasps on the scale and stuffs Steve’s carefully caged genitals into his blue Kevlar. No underwear. Tony even undoes the shackles to pull on Steve’s gloves. He pulls the whip out of Steve’s mouth, hangs it on the hook on his belt.

Tony’s bench is sleek and cruel, designed to hold someone Steve’s size for hours in the most creatively miserable positions Tony can come up with. He doesn’t want to crawl up, because whatever it is, he’s going to be there for as long as Tony’s whims persist, his legs stretched wide and his wrists shackled to his thighs, his head pulled all the way back, his collar bolted to a d-ring.   

Tony is grabbing his ankles, ostensibly to shackle him, and then Steve feels something around his knees. Steve realizes too late, thrashes. Topples onto his face. Tony wrenches his arms around behind him and Steve feels the cuffs clicking shut over his gloves.

“Tony, no,” Steve begs. He doesn’t mean an ounce of it.

Tony chokes him until he quiets and stills, pulls Steve’s head back up until his neck aches from the posture, pulls his leash a little tauter and fastens the chain to his ankles so the most he can do is glance from side to side. Tony is checking Steve’s hands, now, one by one, fastening them to his ankles where they’ve been drawn painfully up to his thighs. He balances on his knees, too much tension on his piteously wrenched shoulders. He aches.

“I want you to think about this tonight,” Tony says, while Steve pants and drools and tries to think about anything but his cock rubbing uselessly against the butt of the bench, his aching shoulders. “You came to me, Steve, you need to put it aside,” Tony says, steel in his voice. “I can expose you,” he whispers. “I can make this all come crashing down. _Hush_.”

“I’m not down,” Steve says desperately. “I’m not down, Tony, please,” he says, his head reeling. He sounds like he’s falling apart at the seams. He can barely string his words together.

Tony comes around to stand in front of his face. Steve can’t tilt his head away, can’t pull back, can only stare at what’s in front of him, at the lines of Tony’s hip and his ample genitalia and the way he plants his feet apart and the jut of his hips. He holds one broad hand to the side of Steve’s head. “I suggest you get there,” Tony says. He holds his palm out for Steve to lick.

Tony plays with himself, edges his cock around Steve’s mouth, drags it over his cheek. Steve opens his mouth, but Tony isn’t interested. He’s jerking himself, rocking back and forth, incidentally bumping his cock against Steve’s cheek, his nose. He’s a set piece, he realizes. _I’m right here_ , he wants to say, but it’s too much, it’s too wretched to imagine that Tony won’t even fuck him.

He presses his eyes shut just in time for Tony to come in warm spurts all over his face. It seems like it lasts forever. Maybe Tony’s modified that, too. Some of it gets in his hair, runs down his neck, drips onto the floor. Sticks in the scale around his throat.

Tony takes a minute to pant. “It’s a good look for you,” he says. “Open.”

Steve can’t. He has no leverage; it’s all he can do to balance the weight between his shoulders and his chin. Tony loses patience, as he does, and manually pries Steve’s jaw apart to force something gleaming and steel between his teeth.

He thinks it’s over, and then Tony cranks his mouth wide, wider.

Steve makes pathetic noises behind the gag.

Tony slaps him. “This is embarrassing, even for you,” he says. “Pull yourself together.”

A blindfold goes over his eyes. Earplugs, and he loses it. He can’t abide it, Tony knows it, he can’t move, he can’t break anything, not chains, not ropes. He has no leverage. He feels one of Tony’s hands mock-soothing him, running over his back, and tries to shake him off, can’t. Tries to head butt Tony, but Tony just holds him down, chokes him until he settles.

Tony puts his fingers firmly under Steve’s waistband, finally, finally he’s going to touch. He runs his hands up Steve’s sides, runs his thumbs over the swell of his pecs where he spills over the sides of the main support.

Tony rips his pants right down the center seam.

Tony wrenches them down around his thighs and reaches around to get at Steve’s cock. He pulls the sound out, agonizingly slowly, and Steve can’t help the ugly grunts that must be falling out of his open mouth. Tony holds one hand around the base of him, but it’s not enough _–_ the minute it starts to slide out of his slit he knows he isn’t going to make it. He can feel the stubborn crawl of come making its way down his length, dribbling uselessly out of him. Tony’s fingers aren’t even in him. Tony is only just now undoing the padlock on the cage, but his face is heating and he knows he’s a mess and the dam has already broken, he needs it, and Tony is cradling his balls and flicking his cockhead with his thumb just for the spite of it, there’s nothing even _left,_ oh _god –_

Tony pulls out one of his earplugs. “You’re a fucking disgrace,” he whispers. Steve knows he’s whimpering. He knows it’s true. He moans, and feels his own drool slip down his chin.

“I’m not saying it,” Steve tries to say, but the gag renders his mouth useless except as a receptacle, and Tony jams his earplugs back in and Steve is in alone in the dark.

Tony doesn’t put the cage back on. Instead, he pulls Steve’s balls back and down with a violent yank. Steve only realizes it’s a humbler when the wood is already snapping around him. He’s hard and uncomfortable and he is certain this cannot be worse until he feels Tony pushing something into his ass, something cold and hard and metal.

Tony wipes the lube off on his face, and then there’s nothing.

 

\- - -

 

His brain falls into a hideous feedback loop. Uncomfortable, irritated, wretched, then terror. He makes sounds with his mouth as well as he can. _Tony, please_ , but there’s the awful metal thing prying his teeth apart and his tongue just waggles uselessly.

Tony hasn’t given him anything to drop. He tries to snap his fingers, once, twice, three times. Is Tony even in the room? Is _he_ even in the same room?

Tony doesn’t come.

There’s nothing to shut – he’s spread wide open, Tony has wired him like a raw nerve. He can’t shut his eyes to the flashing white that snaps across his vision. He thinks he would do anything if Tony would just touch him. Just once. He would take anything.

He keeps seeing the time gem, that perfect moment when it hovered above his palm, the split-second before it fractured. He sees it again, and again. He sees the wild lash of color. He’s in Wakanda on his knees in Necropolis. I’m sorry, Steve. I’m sorry, Steve. I’m sorry, Steve.

Shellhead, he thinks, Shellhead, Shellhead, Shellhead.

At some point, Tony runs his hand through Steve’s hair and the thing in his ass starts to vibrate.

Steve could weep.

 

\- - -

 

The first thing he feels other than the vibrator and his wretchedly engorged cock is Tony, pushing his into Steve’s mouth. Steve almost chokes.

He has no idea how long it’s been. It’s so welcome it’s obscene. He cranes his neck but there’s no need. Tony gives him all of it, down to the hilt. He must have gone out, he smells different. Leather, cologne.

Tony doesn’t touch him except to pull his hair hard enough to bring stinging tears to Steve’s eyes beneath the blindfold.  

He thinks: Tony is winning. Tony has been winning for a long time now. It’s been a contest for a long time, now. He barely remembers how it felt to trust, openly, unconditionally.

Steve tolerates things, now. He tolerates this, Tony using his face, his body. It’s not gentle, but his expectations are so low Steve’s become impossible to disappoint. The blindfold is good, too good for his taste. No shadows, even. Just black. It’s something after so long with _nothing_ , that’s all that matters. He is grateful, so grateful. He even participates. He slides his tongue under Tony’s head, works at the underside of his cock, laps at that spot where his skin bunches again and again and again. If he can stir something in Tony, if he can dredge up something remarkable, Tony will kiss him.

Maybe.

The tired, resigned part of him wonders if Tony feels a fucking thing anymore.

Tony wins; this is the best Steve gets before he gets exiled again. Back to arthritis and pity and the slow creep of death.

Tony's come is too much, he can't swallow all of it, and he isn't warned. Some of it drips from his chin, runs down his neck.

The earplugs come out.

 _ <…like a fucking _ clone _, > _someone – someone who isn’t Tony – says.

Steve’s breath is being carefully managed, or he would scream.

The room is humming. He can pick out bits of conversation, but there are too many people. He thinks he’s going to faint. He thinks Tony is probably monitoring his blood pressure and won’t let that happen.

Tony let this happen. Tony orchestrated this.

 _ <No touching,> _says Tony. Someone laughs. _ <Why would we touch the fag,> _someone says. < _It’s a hole._ >

Someone is in his mouth.

He blinks, as if he isn’t still blindfolded and somehow it will vaporize the horror of it all. No, he thinks, in flat disbelief, and someone tugs on his hair, _gomik_ , they say, there’s spit on his face and there’s no touching except someone is touching his face because he is crying and they’re _laughing_ , it’s funny and there’s an enormous thumb smearing the tears on his cheeks –

 _ <Double,> _ Tony says. _ <Cough up.> _

_ <Bullshit.> _

_ <I said no touching,> _ Tony says.

The door opens. Laughter, somewhere in the main penthouse. Thrumming music. Tony is having a party.

Steve is the back room suckjob.

 _Parameters,_ his brain stutters, because Tony would never.

The cock in his mouth fills him to the back of his throat, and then there’s the sound of money exchanging hands. Tony would never. Tony –

“Spasiba,” Tony is saying.

Steve whimpers experimentally. It earns him a cuff to the head, the choking band around his throat, his ass throbbing as someone dials the controls for the collar all the way up.

He very nearly vomits when he’s released. He tries to suck in a gasp of air but his mouth is full, his throat is blocked. He’s aspirating someone’s semen.

 _No,_ he thinks, but Tony has barreled straight through that, he’s taken Steve’s inches and stretched them to miles. He can hear everyone laughing at him. They should, they should laugh. He should have seen this coming the minute Tony blindfolded him. Tony would never, he wouldn’t, he knows about the ice, about the endless dark.

(Tony did.)

The man in his mouth slides back, settles the head of his cock on Steve’s tongue as he spurts. Steve tastes all of it.

Surely there can’t be so many, he thinks. This is illegal. People are shot for this. People are beaten for this in the streets, here. This is impossible.

This is impossible.

And then there’s Tony, with his uniquely Tony smell, even through the leather and the paste he rubs into his hair and the alcohol stink of him.

“Stop crying,” Tony whispers, his _hair_ brushing against Steve’e ear. “You’re embarrassing me, Steve.”

It’s the closest he’s been. His lips are right there. Steve trembles. The chains holding his arms to his legs to the bench rattle.

Tony ignores all that and slides the vibrator carefully out of Steve’s ass.

“Let these rich men avail themselves of all of you,” says Tony.

Don’t do it, Steve begs, prays, wills. It doesn’t even occur to him to shout. _Pomogite, pomogite, pomogite,_ he thinks.

Don’t leave me here, he thinks. Don’t.

He waits, for Tony to touch his cheek again, for some absurd measure of reassurance that isn’t going to come, for Tony’s lips to brush his head. He forgets that he is covered in come; he forgets that Tony has dressed him like a doll and left him here to rot. He forgets.

Tony slaps him. Says something about color in his cheeks. He scoops up the come dripping from Steve’s chin and shoves it into his mouth.

He thinks that this is the moment. This is what it takes; he’ll remember anger, he’ll remember fear. His apathy will evaporate, all at once, the entropy that’s saturated his life will go. He’ll rip his restraints out of their housing. He’ll call S.H.I.E.L.D.

He’ll act.

Someone calls him a whore in Russian. Someone is fucking him with the vibe. Someone is shoving it in his mouth.

 _Do something,_ he thinks.

He waits for it to end.

 

\- - -

 

He hears it when Tony enters the room, his boots tapping on the floor. The pressure in his mouth goes, all at once, and as Tony slides the gag out of his mouth, the filthy slick of Tony’s guests spills down his chin. He balances like that. He moves his lips, all but numb, tries to spit the taste away, to swallow what he can’t, open-mouthed. There’s nothing to be done.

He has no more accusations left. His rancor has all but dried up, and his miserable body shakes and quivers and slumps against the vinyl. His shoulders are slowly sliding out of joint, the left one may be already; Tony’s pulled the chains too tight. Can Tony fix that? He bites back a miserable laugh.

Tony yanks off the blindfold and Steve sags like a limp doll. He’s half sliding off the bench, his head knocking the frame covered in slime. He breathes in heaving gasps. His hands are shaking as he inches back along the vinyl and tries to touch himself through the shreds of his uniform. He’s loose. He’s torn. He’s bleeding and fluids that don’t belong to Tony are spilling out of him. His muscles won’t even cooperate, so he just lets himself be dead weight. If Tony wants him gone he’ll have to dress him and walk him out the door himself. He imagines himself being led, stumbling, Tony pushing him into a cab without a second glance.

Tony sits in his chair. “I didn’t think I would mind that,” he says quietly.

He tries to undo the humbler himself, scrabbles his fingertips at the latch, can’t reach. He needs to leave. He’s such an idiot. He gives up and lies there, waits for Tony to take it off.

“Do you think you’ve proven something,” Steve hears himself say, because he’s apparently hard-wired for a fight.

“You disregard my rules,” Tony says, “I disregard yours.”

“You don’t give a shit about my rules.”

“You know what I’m talking about,” Tony bursts. He throws something in his lap to the ground. “I told you last time, you leave your bullshit in the States, I’m not your fucking _project_ , I _told you_ ,” he snarls.

Steve loses whatever he was hanging onto and the tears are like a torrent. He can’t see anything, his whole body is like a rotting sore and Tony is across the room and nothing is right.

“I know,” Steve manages. “I haven’t asked–”

“It’s all you’ve been thinking about,” Tony says, and he’s stalking over to him. “All night, yesterday. You dreamt about it when you were unconscious. It’s what got you through the show.”

“Do you want to fight?” Steve says, dull-voiced and exhausted. “You’ll win, do you want to get some more guys in here, what–”

“Stop crying, Steve,” Tony says, his voice flat. He waves his hand and the shackles fall off Steve’s wrists entirely.

“Or what,” Steve spits, as he undoes the clasps around his thighs and his ankles fall blessedly free. “What are you gonna do, Tony–”

“I don’t make you come here,” Tony hisses. “You know what you’re get–”

“You don’t tell me to leave, either,” Steve says. “You fix me so you can use me and then you fucking throw me away–”

“And you keep coming back,” Tony says.

“Do you want immunity, do you want to come home?” Steve asks, ruined and half-naked.

Tony is silent.

“Are you happy,” Tony asks him.

“Yes,” Steve lies. “I’m over the moon.” Something is breaking in him, flooding him; it curls in his belly and rises warm and thick to his throat. “I don’t miss you,” he says, emboldened. “I don’t miss us. I come here so I can offer you the deal, and I leave. I don’t care about you, I wouldn’t change a _thing_ ,” he snarls.

Tony drags him up, one arm wrapped tight around his bicep. Steve sags instantly, lets Tony manhandle him the few feet to the cross. He doesn’t know if he could fight if he wanted to. The blood rushes to his head. He sags, draws his knees up as much as he can to save his balls. Stumbles.

“Stand up,” Tony snaps.

“Make me,” Steve slurs.

Tony pulls him up with preternatural strength, slams his back against the cross, stretches his left arm out.

Puts his knife through Steve’s left hand.

Steve screams. He’s barely able to comprehend what he’s being set up for, because Tony just ruined his hand and Tony is grabbing the bullwhip from the notch at his hip and Steve is _on his back –_

Tony rips the scale right down the center of his chest.

He can feel the mess dripping out of his ass and down his trembling legs. Steve hangs, scrabbles his toes against the tile. He’s out of breath: sloppy. He feels like he’s dying, like his chest is coming apart in shreds. He can feel what’s left of his shirtsleeve dampening with his own hot blood. Tony yells at him, tells him to stand up. He stumbles over his own feet, feels the gaping place between his legs, the disgusting slick of however many men. His pants are mostly gone.

“Tony–”

“Safeword,” Tony snarls, and there’s nothing Steve recognizes in that.

He won’t do it.

Tony steps back, back, back. Snaps the whip.

“Face me,” Steve coughs.

“I am facing you,” says Tony, bronze, perfect, untouchable.

“No, your. Your real eyes.”

Tony stares, and then the white recedes and there’s that cold dark blue.

“Is this what you want,” Tony asks, and flicks his wrist.

Pain sears over his side. It’s nothing Steve wants.

It’s not a hard stroke, it’s barely a whisper compared to what he knows Tony is capable of. A warning shot. Steve curls his right hand into a useless fist, anyway. He can’t pull himself up, he’s hollowed and spent. Tony’s potion only fixes the outside until Tony tells it to do something else; there’s no serum in his blood. There’s no fight to be found in him.

“It’s one word,” Tony says, swinging his wrist, letting the blows fall a little too sharp for a warm-up. “You know what to do, Steve,” Tony says, and his arm is moving faster than Steve can brace for it.

It hits the inside of his thigh, the tip of it slices over his cock. It’s not a mistake.

Steve screams into the room. It climbs out of his throat, bounces off the laminate. He loses his knees. Can anyone hear him through these walls? He must be bleeding, Tony was never going to warm him up, not for this, not now. The flesh must be hanging from him.

Tony hits him again.

His eyes roll back. Other people, evil people, have done this to him, back when his cells regenerated at the same rate they died, back when he was perfect and untouched and there wasn’t a single crack in his armor.

They weren’t Tony.

“Tell me,” and Tony is there, whispering in his ear, “You hate this, Steve, make it stop.” He trails the handle of the whip over the lines of Steve’s throat, presses it up against his pulsing blood. “You’re such a _coward_ ,” Tony hisses after his silence. He flicks the hilt of the knife because he’s a monster and Steve just crawls back to him, every time.

He screams through the next stroke, his chest aflame. Hot. The tongue of it has wrapped around his shoulder, snaked up his neck. The cracker has sliced perilously close to his carotid. He’s shaking. Tony is going to take out one of his eyes if he loses control for even an instant.

“How far are you going to take this,” Tony says, and strides back up, runs his fingers over the welts while Steve thrashes his head and whimpers. “No, I’ve seen you suffer, Steven, look at me, _look at me._ ”

His eyes are squeezed shut, the bright pain of the knife a burning weight against his palm. He focuses on the slice of it, the chill, the way it separates his bones.

“Say it,” Tony insists. “Tell me why you come here.”

 _Because I’m snared_ , Steve wants to say. _Because I’m dying and this is where you live and I remember what you used to be_.

“Fucking hit me,” Steve chokes out, pinned to the wall like a moth, shredded and bleeding, and Tony lets out a noise like a snarl and slices Steve’s chest open.

Gone is Tony’s gentle, measured hand. What’s left is different, hollow. Finesse, certainly, in spades: Tony can calculate vectors and angles and speeds in an instant. It’s the human element he’s given up. Steve doesn’t even blame him anymore. Tony’s always been ahead. He was always going to win.

It’s easier to tell when things are too much, now that Steve is normal. He’s lost his preternatural durability. His screams come easily, grating his throat. Tony has an axe to grind, and the whip sings through the air and cracks his flesh wide, splits his skin. There’s something wrong with his shoulder muscles. He’s hanging. He can’t hold himself up.

“Safeword,” Tony hisses, again.

He’s going to die here, in a sex dungeon in Moscow a million miles from New York. Tony is going to beat him to death because neither of them can put their unbearable egos aside.

That part has always been a draw.

“No,” he wants to say, but his mouth makes the shape of Tony’s name, instead.

Steve’s eyes are open, unseeing. He’s vaguely aware of Tony gripping his chin, yelling, flecks of spit landing on his face.

Maybe this is how Tony felt - so stubborn he’d rather die than apologize, dead around the eyes as Steve cracked his shield against Tony’s bones. _I’d do it again,_ he said.

Steve wouldn’t do any of it again.

“What is wrong with you,” Tony is saying, and he rips the knife out of Steve’s hand. Steve goes crashing down, cradling his ruined hand, the blood sticking in his sleeves. He howls as he takes the brunt of the impact on his bare shoulder.

“Beg me for it.” rolls him hard onto his back and Steve’s breath huffs out of him in a wheeze. Tony sits on his chest, and it’s agony. He digs his heels into Steve’s ribs, cuts his nails into the places he’s been sliced. Slaps him. “You’re not better,” he whispers, and the smell of him fills Steve’s nose, the thick wash of sweat and sex chokes him as Tony inches up and jerks his own flesh. “You’re not better than me.” He rips off his gloves with his teeth, reaches behind him to unclasp the humbler. Steve’s not hard, he won’t be. This isn’t about him. There won’t be praise.

“Open your mouth, Steve,” Tony says. He coaxes a thumb to the corner of Steve’s lips.

Steve’s lip trembles. He’s going to burst. He’s going to die. He wants to be back up hanging from the ceiling. He wants Tony to finish it.

He opens his mouth.

Tony fucks him, buries both of his hands securely in Steve’s hair and _thrusts_. Steve’s head bangs against the floor. It feels ugly. He coughs, splutters – there’s still come trickling out of his mouth from earlier. Tony doesn’t slow.

“No one knows where you are,” Tony says. “You walked around the square seven times before you were convinced Nat wasn’t following you. You still trust me, Steve, you’re sick, you know that, fucking _say it!_ ”

He’s losing oxygen. Tony bends over him, bends low enough that his stomach touches Steve’s forehead.

“Ask me,” Tony goads him. “Ask me to do it. Right here.”

“Come back,” Steve gasps into Tony's skin.

“No, that’s _not it_ ,” Tony screams. “ _Tell me_.” He pulls himself out of Steve’s mouth, barely hard. He puts his hands on Steve’s beaten face. He leans down, brushes Steve’s hair off of his forehead. He’s sobbing. His eyes are blue.

Just let it be over, Steve thinks. Let this be the last time.

“Fuck you, Steve _,_ ” Tony cries. “Fuck you.”

“Shellhead,” Steve safewords.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Again, thanks to my wonderful artist phoenixmetaphor - tell her how fantastic her art is [HERE](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7029175/chapters/15994852). 
> 
> Follow me on tumblr at [kiyaarontherun.tumblr.com](kiyaarontherun.tumblr.com). 
> 
> Here is a **[rebloggable tumblr masterpost](http://kiyaarontherun.tumblr.com/post/145165888518/fic-take-my-body-home-rbb-written-for-the)**.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Get Under My Skin [Take My Body Home Remix]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13629936) by [Missy_dee811](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy_dee811/pseuds/Missy_dee811)




End file.
